It seems the change of ownership at ARM has resulted in a dramatic change of public discourse. In what is an Arm first, the company behind the highest-sold CPU design in the world is talking openly about challenging Intel's dominance of (laptop/notebook) mobile computing.

This is quite a surprise. Arm is typically very low-key about its roadmaps and research, and that is what allowed it to achieve the position of dominance in low-power, high-performance SoCs. Now, it seems, there is a new PR narrative going on at Arm.

In a lengthy announcement, Arm has made public its plans for the next two generations of chip architectures - Deimos and Hercules - and how it plans to wrestle away market share from Intel. Leveraging its gains over the past five years, it says, it has been able to deliver double-digit IPC gains year-on-year, culminating in the launch of the Cortex-A76 CPU design and a claimed 35% performance gain over its predecessor.

According to the roadmap, Cortex-A76 will be produced both in 10nm and 7nm, this year. Clearly flexing its partners' manufacturing muscle and rubbing salt in Intel's wound, Arm says the 7nm Cortex-A76 will already provide the same performance as Intel's mobile chips, at a third of the design power.

The Arm roadmap shows us the follow up the Cortex-A76 in 2019 with 'Deimos', also built on a 7nm LP process node. And when Deimos arrives, Arm is making it clear there should be no doubt in partners' minds which is the best chip. 'Deimos', claims Arm, "is expected to deliver a 15+ percent increase in compute performance".

Come end of 2019, Arm partners are enticed to play around with 'Hercules', a new CPU design which Arm says will deliver around 10 percent gains in performance and die size (and more, once it is shrunk to 5nm). So by the time Intel gets its first mature 10nm design out of the door, Arm, by way of TSMC, will be debuting its 5nm process node.

Ironically, the Arm roadmap almost reads like an old-school Intel tick-tock roadmap.

“The CPU roadmap Arm has laid out coupled with Qualcomm’s heterogenous approach to computing across our various IP block and integrated connectivity, will allow for new advancements in the always-on, always-connected PC experience offered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon Mobile Compute Platform,” said Alex Katouzian, senior vice president and general manager, mobile, Qualcomm Technologies, Inc.

Arm's position couldn't be stronger. Windows 10 on ARM is a fact, Intel is held up with a broken node and AMD is stealing market share on desktop and server. With 5G arriving in a few months, we're looking at a roadwarrior's dream come true. If Intel wasn't looking troubled enough, this probably hits home with the force of an A-bomb.

Arm promises more will be revealed come October 16th, when it holds its Arm TechCon in San Jose. Interesting times await us, no doubt about that.

Not surprising given that low power is the whole point of ARM, so really being able to take more of the low power market is more like them achieving their original goal. Intel choose to sit on 4 core parts for years and milk their customers, I have zero sympathy for any market share they loose to ARM or AMD.

Notice how Arm is spelled with a capital A, but most of us think of it as ARM as an acronym? Apparently Acorn RISC Machine was the company that came up with the design (RISC is Reduced Instruction Set Computing) and called the architecture ARM. Then they changed it to Advanced RISC Machine. Now they call themselves Arm and their logo is all lower-case 'arm'

So the company Arm makes processors using the ARM architecture. As brilliant as they all are - it's too bad they couldn't hire anyone to do marketing.

Honestly - I'd buy intel just because this naming is so annoying and confusing. But Intel calls their processors things like Coffee-Lake and Sky-Lake and all sorts of other things better suited to ivy-league country clubs.

Full props to AMD for using 'Ryzen' - a name that sound appropriate for a CPU.

Why can't Qualcomm and Intel collaborate to start building a series of a single die CPUs housing both cores? That way Intel core(s) kicks in only during intense Win32 operations like photoshop, ACAD, etc., and the rest of the times ARM would function for long battery life and Always Connected function....

Full props to AMD for using 'Ryzen' - a name that sound appropriate for a CPU.

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Half props for mimicking the terrible Intel names though. A Ryzen 7 should have had seven cores, like the name says. What sounds cooler, an i7 or an R8? There's absolutely no excuse for these marketing people to name thing so poorly at all. How does that stuff even get through to production anyway? Who could possibly decide to name a CPU anything other than its core count?

Not hating on just AMD here, but Intel and Arm and any other company (MICROSOFT) that thinks its clientele can't count to 8 or 9. Or 10. It's demeaning.

They will be faster in PPT presentation slides.
Considering they are now at Atom/Celeron level with their best of the best, and that is in apps that run natively! then I really do think they are dreaming.

Uh huh. So ARM's best will go from being slower then an atom in 2018 to faster then a core I5 in 2019?

Oh right, it will be faster on paper, and in benchmarks that are cross platform, but running anything production based or anything other then basic web browsers, x86 processors will be far ahead.

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You think people do ''production based'' stuff on a Core I-5u? Anybody that buys a laptop with such a processor is browsing the web and watching movies, they want longer battery life in a slim design. This will definitely drive innovation when it comes to laptop CPUs, from AMD and Intel.

Another year another company promising they will beat Intel. I’d love that to happen but il believe it when I see it, Intel have been making the fastest and most efficient chips for a decade or so now.

Another year another company promising they will beat Intel. I’d love that to happen but il believe it when I see it, Intel have been making the fastest and most efficient chips for a decade or so now.

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No company has every ''promised to beat Intel'', what are you talking about?